BuddyPress

Hi, I’m trying to use bp_has_members to display a filtered list of members on a page. I can get this to work with 1 search phrase but I need to display a list of members that fulfill more than 1 search phrase. For instance, I need to list whatever the member filled in for “Business Category” in xprofile. I can’t figure out how to get this to work. I saw something promising with BP Member Filter but that plugin is no longer offered/supported? I just can’t find documentation this. It’s really hanging me up at the moment since it’s a big part of my site build. Here’s what I’ve tried below. Only 1 search term allowed it seems. I also need to be able to run multiple search results on the page separated by headlines. This is what I’ve tried and an unable to get more than 1 search term to show up in any variation I’ve tried.

<?php if ( bp_has_members( 'search_terms=wineries&type=alphabetical' ) ) : ?>
    <?php do_action( 'bp_before_directory_members_list' ) ?>
    <ul id="members-list" class="item-list">
    <?php while ( bp_members() ) : bp_the_member(); ?>
        <li>
            <div class="item">
                <div class="item-title"><a href="<?php bp_member_permalink() ?>"><?php bp_member_name() ?></a></div>
                <?php do_action( 'bp_directory_members_item' ) ?>
            </div><!-- item -->
            <div class="clear"></div>
        </li>
    <?php endwhile; ?>
    </ul>
    <?php do_action( 'bp_after_directory_members_list' ) ?>
    <?php bp_member_hidden_fields() ?>
 <?php else: ?>
 <?php endif; ?>

Unfortunately, you’re not going to be able to do this with the search_terms parameter. Our query class simply isn’t set up to work that way.

You may be interested in looking at my plugin BP Better Directories, which takes probably the only viable route to doing what you want to do: it filters the SQL query directly, and then adds more WHERE clauses. Here’s the plugin https://github.com/boonebgorges/bp-better-directories and here are some of the key parts that you will want to look it. (Note that I’ve tried to be super abstract in order to handle different kinds of content – your code could be much simpler.)

- where I add the filters to the queries: https://github.com/boonebgorges/bp-better-directories/blob/0.9.x/bpbd.php#L51
- the heavy lifting is https://github.com/boonebgorges/bp-better-directories/blob/0.9.x/bpbd.php#L104 It’s written to loop through and do an additional join for each of the search parameters. Line 127 is where I’m making the new LIKE clauses. Then, on 142, I blow up the original query and stick my new clauses in there.

Not pretty (and it won’t scale infinitely – don’t try doing this with 10 different filters on a large member database!) but it does work.

Thanks @boonebgorges I appreciate the help. Going in to BP, I thought it would be a simple function to filter members. You said this won’t scale infinitely so would you foresee an issue with a site having 300 members where I’d want to display 10 filtered lists on a page? For instance, a list broken up into 10 categories? I’ll be diving in to this over the weekend but first wondered if this is a safe path to travel or if this won’t work for me. Thanks again!

The core reason why it’s difficult to do infinite filters like this is because BP xprofile fields are abstracted. That is to say, in order for our profile fields to be extensible (so that your site can have different profile fields from mine) we have moved the profile data to a separate table, which is essentially a key-value table. This is in contrast to a solution where you store all profile data in a single table, making it very easy and fast to filter by many criteria at once (the trade-off being that the table structure needs to be set in stone).

The numbers you cite shouldn’t be much of a problem. You may experience some slowness if you try filtering along 7, 8, 9 criteria at the same time, though I suspect that this is probably an edge case. In any case, some solid MySQL query caching will help.